Product design question
Improve the experience of a customer in a shoe store?
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Easy
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Basic product sense in a physical retail context, checking whether you can identify a real friction point and design a targeted fix.
How to approach it
- Define the user: someone shopping for shoes in-store, distinguishing a quick-purchase shopper from someone trying multiple styles and sizes.
- Walk the current journey: browsing, finding a style, asking staff for a size, waiting, trying on, deciding, checkout.
- Identify the core pain point: waiting for staff to fetch sizes, which is slow during busy periods and drives abandonment.
- Prioritize this over secondary issues like store layout, since wait time is the most cited friction in shoe retail.
- Propose a fix: an in-store app or kiosk showing real-time size and color availability, letting customers self-request a size without waiting for staff.
- Define success as reduced average wait time from request to try-on and increased conversion rate per store visit.
What a strong answer includes
- Picks the size-fetch wait as the dominant pain point, backed by the reasoning that it's the most common complaint in shoe retail, not a guess.
- Proposes a concrete mechanism, real-time inventory visibility, rather than a vague 'improve staff training' answer.
- Ties the fix to a measurable outcome, wait time and conversion, not just customer satisfaction in the abstract.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a broad store redesign instead of a targeted fix for the biggest friction point.
- Ignoring measurement, leaving no way to know if the fix actually worked.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle sizes that are genuinely out of stock?
- How would you roll this out across stores with different staff and layouts?
More product design questions
- How would you improve Outlook for the use case when people get overwhelmed by number of emails received after returning from a vacation?Microsoft · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Microsoft Teams?Microsoft · Product design · Easy
- Design a loyalty program for a search engine that's competing with Google & Bing.Google · Product design · Hard
- How would you improve Microsoft OneNote?Microsoft · Product design · Easy
- How would you improve the MS Teams search functionality as a Search PM at Microsoft Teams?Microsoft · Product design · Medium
- How would you design a car sharing platform like Uber for disabled people?Lyft · Product design · Hard
More questions from Microsoft
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop